A DEA Fiasco: The Inside Story of an Operation the Drug Enforcement Agency Now Denies
Sitting on a couch, a gun in his hand, the Serbian kidnapper Petar Tomasevic realized he was in danger. It was still dark, and the hostages were supposed to be in their reclusion spots, but suddenly two of the crew of the tugboat Paradise stormed the command bridge and attacked Tomasevic, according to Justiniano Valle, the ship’s boatswain.
It was November 11, 2023. The tugboat had left the Dominican Republic in October with 2,000 kilos of cocaine on board. The drugs’ street value was around $78 million dollars.
Manuel Montalbán, a Nicaraguan welder, was the first to burst into the command bridge. He ran towards the Serbian and threw battery acid at his face. Then, the tall, robust, 38-year-old Haitian cook, Jasmin Pierre-Saint, tried to disarm Tomasevic by hitting his hand with a small axe he had found nearby.
The acid failed to neutralize the kidnapper, who responded by shooting Pierre-Saint twice, according to court statements.
Montalbán, the Nicaraguan welder, escaped unscathed, but Pierre-Saint was badly wounded. He struggled down the stairs to the boat’s second level and collapsed in front of the mess hall’s bathroom. He died moments later.
Not long before that, Tomasevic had forced the captain to change the tugboat’s course to Portuguese waters, where of an international drug trafficking organization were supposed to pick the 2,000 kilos, according to the crew’s testimonies.
A Spanish Customs patrol boat with trained officers from the National Police intercepted the tugboat approximately 25 miles from Santa Cruz de la Palma, a Spanish island, before they reached the rendezvous with the drug traffickers.
A police negotiator convinced Tomasevic to surrender. The officers then arrested him and the other eight crew on board. They were all accused of drug trafficking before the courts of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The Serbian was also charged with murder.
The death of Jasmin Pierre-Saint, in November 2023, was the fateful, deadly twist of an undercover operation led by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
The agency has denied its involvement in the operation before the Spanish justice, even though there is evidence that one of the DEA’s offices in US coordinated the failed plan from the outset.
The operation’s goal was to infiltrate a powerful drug trafficking organization in Europe, ran by an Albanian known to law enforcement agencies only by his alias, The Pope.
Univision Investiga spoke to the United States’ government informant who coordinated the operation with the DEA. He said he has firsthand knowledge of the reasons behind the DEA fiasco that culminated with Pierre-Saint’s death. And this is the first time he is telling the story.
His name is Jorge Enrique Velásquez, but he is better known for his alias, “El Navegante,” The Navigator. Velásquez went down in the history of Colombian drug trafficking for facilitating the killing by authorities of José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, alias the Mexican, one of the most violent member of the Medellín Cartel.
The Navigator says that the DEA is trying to “wash its hands” at the cost of the innocence of the Latin American crew of the Sea Paradise.
“I believe it’s the dirtiest thing I’ve ever seen in the many years I’ve been working with the agency,” said Velásquez, who is a United States resident. He claims he has never faced drug trafficking charges in Colombia or elsewhere, and, so far, he hasn’t been indicted for the failed operation in Spain.
The Navigator says that he will share evidence that shows that DEA agent Lorena Jiménez, who is part of the agency’s Caribbean Corridor Strike Force, in Puerto Rico, coordinated the operation from mid-2023 until Tomasevic’s capture on November 11 of that year.
Velásquez shared with Univision several WhatsApp messages in which Jiménez gives orders, plans, and hails specific actions that are part of the operation. Jiménez even set up a security plan when she found out that Velásquez was in danger of being kidnapped by The Pope’s men in the Dominican Republic.
Velásquez says that the DEA was supervising the operation. To back his argument, he showed Univision reporters a text message in which agent Jiménez states that she spoke with the tugboat’s captain, Eduardo Ingar.
“The captain called me!” wrote on November 8, 2023, someone whose name in the chat is “DEA SA Lorena Jiménez PR.” The abbreviation SA stands for Special Agent. PR stands for Puerto Rico.
From a prison in Tenerife, Ingar told Univision that he made the call from the tugboat at Velásquez’s request, using a satellite phone.
“Lorena Jiménez picked up and thanked me for calling,” the captain says. Then Jiménez told him: “I am in charge of this. If you have any problem, you me, and I’ll be in the loop,” according to Ingar.
Velásquez thanked Jiménez for speaking with the captain.
“I'm glad they are more certain about who they are with,” he wrote.
Jiménez’s communication with the captain, which took place a few days before Tomasevic’s kidnapping, was very important, according to The Navigator, since it cleared any remaining doubts the crew might have had about the DEA’s role in the operation.
The Sea Paradise’s crew spoke with Univision from a prison in Tenerife. They all said that they acted thinking that they were on the right side of the law, even if they didn’t have a written agreement with the DEA.
According to The Navigator, they all knew that they were working with a government agency, and they did what they could to prevent the delivery of the drugs to the criminal organization.
“Here the (Spanish) prosecutor is treating us like we are the worst criminals, the worst murderers, the worst narcos, and drug traffickers,” said Manuel Montalbán, a Nicaraguan welder who was part of the Sea Paradise’s crew. “And we are not because what we were doing was supposed to benefit society.”
Other of the crew pointed out that they had worked with Velásquez before on similar operations, and that there had never been any problems.
The DEA told Spanish courts a different version. The agency asserted, before the Central Investigating Court No. 5, that they were not “responsible for the Sea Paradise vessel or for the controlled substances found on board.”
Based on this information and on the undisputed fact that none of the crew had any written cooperation agreements with the agency, the Spanish prosecutor in charge of the case concluded that the argument in favor of their innocence didn’t have the “slightest evidentiary .”
In the chats kept by Velásquez there is another sporadic participant who identified as Douglas. The Navigator says he is another DEA agent.
The DEA hasn’t replied to numerous interview requests and to two questionnaires sent by Univision. Velásquez showed Univision a copy of a complaint he filed against the DEA before the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), telling his version of the story. The OIG hasn’t answered.
Roque Esteban García, Petar Tomasevic’s defense attorney in the Canary Islands, told Univision that his client’s role in the murder of Jasmin Pierre-Saint and the kidnapping of the tugboat hasn’t been proven.
“We categorically deny that Petar shot or that that he even had that gun in his hand,” García said. “There are contradictory versions about this supposed fact. The other people involved gave completely disparate versions.”
According to García, the Serbian was just another crew member who was traveling to Spain in search of work.
Authorities usually don’t take long to publicly boast when they seize large caches of drugs. In this case, however, they took their time. An official statement about the two tons of cocaine found on board the Sea Paradise was released in March, three months after the seizure. In the press release announcing the interdiction, the Spanish police said the delay was a result of “judicial secrecy.”
The Decoy
For more than 30 years, Jorge Enrique Velásquez has been working as a confidential informant for several government agencies. Eventually, he developed a nautical decoy to catch drug traffickers that rarely fails, he says. The trap was simple: he set a meeting point in the Caribbean, where narcotics suppliers would send the merchandise in speed boats. There he could safely transfer the load to a “mother ship” under his control.
The ship with the drugs is then supposed to continue its course towards Europe or Africa, but before that happens, out of the blue, frigates, patrol boats, and U.S. or Colombian helicopters appear, seize the cocaine, and arrest the drug traffickers.
In the case of the Sea Paradise, Velásquez chose Europe as the drugs’ destination, following the DEA’s instructions, he says. It had all started early in 2023, when a Colombian narcotics broker asked him to send at least 2,000 kilos of cocaine to the Azores Islands, in Portugal. The drugs would be delivered to The Pope’s organization. The Navigator accepted the deal and started to plan the decoy.
Velásquez says that he used an advance that the owners of the drugs gave him to buy a tugboat with a Bolivian flag. It was built in Canada, in 1973, and it measured 45 meters in length and 13.7 m in beam. He paid $820,000 dollars for it.
The Pope immediately asked The Navigator to change the Bolivian flag for a Panamanian one, since he believed that people associated Bolivia with illegal drugs. Velásquez complied.
The Navigator doesn’t the exact date when he notified the DEA office in Puerto Rico of his plans. The closest date he can think of is July 20, 2023. That day, Lorena Jiménez, the DEA agent, created a group chat called “DR bote con 4.” DR, which stands for Dominican Republic. Jiménez, who seems to be fluent in English and Spanish, though she sometimes makes spelling mistakes in the latter language, wrote: “Este chat vamos a usar para coordinar el viaje que estamos cuadrando.” That is: “We are going to use this chat to coordinate the trip we are setting up.”
In the WhatsApp chat, the agent refers to Velásquez as “Nave,” short for Navegante. The exchanges show that Jiménez was always willing to listen to the 70-year-old informant’s opinions. On some occasions, Jiménez uses an emoji of a strong arm to show her for some of his ideas.
On October 10, for instance, Jiménez asked Velásquez: “The money out of the 74400 that was already paid—should I transfer them now to the ship? Or what should I do with it? Please.”
Velásquez showed Univision banking records to back up his explanation of how the operation’s ing worked: the drug traffickers would send the funds to a company that he said to them was a money laundering business he owned. In truth it was a shell company set up by the DEA. The agency would receive the narcos’ money and send part of it to the informant through bank s of businesses he did own.
According to Velásquez, he paid for the tugboat’s renovation and the crew ’ wages, which amounted to around $23,000 dollars every month, using those funds. For at least eight months, he paid the sailors’ salaries that way, he said.
The Wait
While the operation was under way, Velásquez set up a command center in his apartment in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. From there, he traced the course of the tugboat in old-school navigational charts. He was proud of doing it that way. He was also connected to commercial databases that transmitted live the position and the movements of the vessel, but he liked doing it like he used to decades ago.
Nostalgia aside, the Navigator says he spent thousands of dollars installing the best communications equipment available in the Sea Paradise.
While Velásquez equipped the tugboat, Gilberto Medina, a Cuban naval inspector who lives in Bocachica, in the Dominican Republic, managed the hiring of the crew. He checked their criminal records before accepting them, he told Univision.
“None of them had criminal records. They were never punished in a boat for indiscipline,” Medina said.
At Velásquez’s request, Medina also processed the paperwork of Tomasevic, who was supposed to be The Pope’s representative in the tugboat, according to the criminal investigation in Spain. Before the Sea Paradise’s departure, the Serbian emissary moved into a modest yacht that Medina kept in the marine, in Bocachica.
The naval inspector re him as a silent man who tanned, swam in the sea, and spoke Serbian on his cell phone “all day”. He didn’t speak Spanish and his English was limited, Medina says. Medina suspects that he had military training. The rest of the crew agree.
The Pope’s organization also sent to Santo Domingo a 41-year-old Albanian, known by the alias of Fran. Fran had been living in Cali, Colombia. His job was to shadow Velásquez and report on his every move. When the operation failed, he nearly killed himself by jumping off a building, in Santo Domingo, according to The Navigator. He reportedly told Velásquez that The Pope was going to kill his family in Spain.
While the Serbians lounged in the Dominican Republic’s capital, Medina chose the Sea Paradise’s crew. He hired Ernesto Alonso, a Cuban with a Spanish port, as the tugboat’s captain, alongside the Peruvian Eduardo Ingar. He chose Osvaldo Zuleta, another Cuban, as the tugboat’s chief engineer and Ramón Ocampo as the machinist. Justiniano Valle, a Bolivian handyman who saw the sea for the first time as an adult and then became a great navigator, according to Medina, became the ship’s boatswain. Medina also hired Giovany Melgar, another Bolivian, as the helmsman, and the Haitian Chanel Antoine, as the oiler.
Since the presence of a tugboat in the middle of the Atlantic could raise suspicions, Velásquez bought an abandoned tanker in the dock of Calderas, in the Dominican Republic. If people asked, the tugboat was supposed to transport the tanker to Egypt for repairs.
The Departure
On October 13,the Sea Paradise left the port of Barahona tugging the Khaleesi, the dilapidated tanker the Navigator had bought. Tomasevic, who appeared to have no maritime experience, chose one of the vessel’s cabins and stayed there, trying to deal with his mounting sea sickness, according to the other crew ’ testimonies. He also hid a gun somewhere in the boat, the investigation concluded. That day, the captain reported fair weather.
Roque García, Tomasevic’s defense attorney, says that his client “had always worked as a sailor,” and that, if he felt sick, it was a consequence of “landing sickness,” a common symptom with seafarers. It’s not like flight attendants never feel dizzy, García said to excuse his client.
When he was asked why Tomasevic chose a vessel that was taking weeks to leave for Spain instead of taking a plane to get there, García said that it was just “an option” Tomasevic was offered.
“He has no criminal records, military training, or knowledge of guns. He has absolutely nothing of what has been said during the judicial process,” García said.
Two days after both vessels reached a location around 100 miles from the island of Aruba, speedboats arrived with two tons of cocaine, which had left from the northern border between Colombia and Venezuela.
Some of the crew who had worked with Velásquez in previous operations were surprised by what happened next, they said. The DEA and the United States Coast Guard were supposed to appear unexpectedly to seize the drugs and arrest Tomasevic and his accomplices in the speedboats. That was the way Velásquez’s traps had always worked.
But this time they only saw a drone, Montalbán says.
“I asked the captain, and he told me that the drone belonged to the DEA,” the welder said. “That they were following what we were doing, step by step.”
Valle, the boatswain, said that Velásquez had told him that the drugs were never coming on board because they were going to use their usual tactics. But something changed.
“Their goal [the DEA’s] wasn’t what I had planned at the outset: staying there,” Velásquez said. “Rather, something more important had come up: trying to reach the owners of the merchandise, the bosses.”
The men loaded the 57 packs onto the tanker Khaleesi not the tugboat. While they moved the drugs, however, a young crew member in the Khaleesi nearly lost a finger when it got stuck in the crane’s mechanism. The wound became gangrenous soon after.
“And the boy with the finger, is it very bad?” agent Jiménez asked The Navigator in a chat.
Velásquez says that The Pope told him to throw the young man overboard to avoid stalling the trip. The Navigator ignored him and sent the wounded crew member to the Dominican Republic, where the young man’s mother saved his finger using home ointments and herbs.
Using the incident as an excuse, Velásquez ditched the tanker to a nearby port.
“It was a nuisance,” he told Univision.
The Pope acquiesced, and the drugs were moved to the tugboat while all the crew watched.
Then the vessel set its course to a nearby pick up location, where it would receive another 2,000 kilos. Before they reached the coordinates, however, they abruptly changed their direction. The Pope suspected that the authorities were on to them and decided not to risk the second load, according to Velásquez.
After the failure of the second delivery, the tugboat continued its course to Europe. On November 9, one day before agent Jiménez told the Sea Paradise’s captain that the DEA was overseeing the operation, Dustin Harmon, the agency’s attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, sent a document to the Spanish police’s Drugs and Organized Crime Unit describing what he called their investigation.
Harmon wrote that the DEA knew that an international criminal gang was trying to smuggle 2,000 kilos of cocaine into Spanish territory. There had been trouble arranging the pick-up, so “the receiving organization is looking for solutions to introduce the cocaine,” Harmon wrote. This warranted “an undercover operation,” he added.
The DEA invited the Spanish police to participate in a “controlled delivery,” an operation in which authorities monitor the drugs until they end up in the hands of the traffickers.
It’s not clear whether the U.S. government told Spanish authorities about the operation in a timely fashion. A former DEA agent, who spoke to Univision Investiga on condition of anonymity, said that, in this kind of international operations, the protocols call for agencies to inform other governments beforehand.
“Notifying another government in the middle of the operation, I don’t think that’s right,” the former agent told Univision.
A Clash of Routes
Two different routes that snaked through The Navigator’s charts raised tensions in the Sea Paradise while the vessel headed from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. One of the routes, the one ordered by The Pope, ended in the Azores Islands, in Portugal, while the other, the one imposed by the DEA, finished in the Canary Islands, in Spain.
Velásquez told the crew that they should trick Tomasevic about the tugboat’s course, since he clearly had no navigational skills. The problem was that The Pope was closely following the tugboat’s movements using a GPS, so he knew they were trying to fool his representative and ignore his orders.
“What we are doing is a shame, brother, make them follow our orders… They can’t change course,” The Pope wrote to Olaf, the nom de guerre Velásquez was using when communicating with the organization.
The machinists reduced the vessel’s speed claiming falsely that the engines were overheating. The captains maintained the tugboat on the DEA sanctioned route until the night of November 10, when Tomasevic appeared in the command bridge, at around 7 p.m. The Serbian immediately put a gun to captain Ingar’s right temple, the Peruvian told both Spanish courts and Univision.
“He grabbed my neck and told me to stay calm, that nothing was going to happen. Then he called everyone and told them to come up to the bridge,” Ingar said.
According to court documents, the rest of the crew went up to the bridge. They all heard the same threat: the Serbian told them that he would kill them if they didn’t follow his orders. But, using a carrot and stick approach, he also said that he was willing to pay them $30,000 dollars—minutes later he offered $60,000—if they set the tugboat on the right course.
The crew rejected his proposal. Five of them exited the bridge and hid in the servomotor, an obscure corner of the engine room, on the ship’s stern. Before that, though, they used the satellite phone to inform Velásquez of the bad news.
In the Dominican Republic, The Navigator was dealing with another crisis. Fran, The Pope’s man in the island, told him that his boss was going to murder his family if the tugboat didn’t change course.
Fran begged and insulted Velásquez via chat to convince him to follow The Pope’s orders. At one point, he said that he would rather kill himself than have his wife and children murdered in Europe. The Navigator has a video in his cellphone in which Fran supposedly shows him the window from which he was planning to jump. He cries and implores him to listen to his pleas.
In the end, Fran didn’t kill himself. After Tomasevic gained control of the Sea Paradise, Velásquez started suspecting that The Pope had ordered his kidnapping. When he shared his hunch with the DEA, Jiménez opened a new chat to advise him on security measures he could take to protect himself in Santo Domingo. The agent referred to Fran as Frank.
The day that The Navigator had a meeting with Fran, Jiménez asked him to take a selfie to send it to local police and her people in the Dominican Republic’s capital. The DEA agent didn’t hide how worried she was about Velásquez and expressed her solidarity with him.
“Before you meet Frank let me know where and at what time, so I have to time to warn my people,” Jiménez wrote.
Velásquez wasn’t only worried about his safety. For him, the situation in the tugboat called for the crew to neutralize Tomasevic. In the tugboat, the men tried to put the Serbian to sleep by giving him a sedative in a juice, but, for some reason, it didn’t work.
Agent Jiménez was aware of the plan. “Peter already ate his medicine,” she wrote in the chat.
The Corpse in the Sea
Tomasevic was the only one who screamed. He shot Jasmin Pierre-Saint twice, but the other crew only heard the Serbian’s wails. He was in horrible pain because of the sulfuric acid in the battery liquid, Valle, the boatswain, told Univision.
Shortly after, Velásquez informed DEA agent Jiménez of what had happened: “Peter killed Jasmine please answer.”
Tomasevic’s defense attorney argues that the Serbian was the only person in the tugboat who was tested for ballistics.
“It was negative, that is, there weren’t any biological traces indicating he fired a gun,” Roque García said. “Petar was a guinea pig, as we say here in Spain, who was placed in the eye of the hurricane.”
The first person who ran into the agonizing Pierre-Saint was his countryman, Chanel Antoine. He found the Haitian cook on the floor. He was barely alive, lying next to the mess hall’s bathroom.
“I started shaking him and calling by his name. What’s up Jasmin? Don’t fool around. And he wouldn’t answer,” Chanel Antoine said. “He would just make noises and say ‘Ahh!’ That’s when I sat down, and I felt something sticky in my hand. And when I looked at it, I saw blood. And I saw that there was a hole in his right arm, a bullet hole. And I took off his sweater, and there I found another hole. So, I was saying ‘Wow,’ and then Jasmin died.”
Hours later, the Bolivian boatswain, Valle, found the corpse and informed Tomasevic. The Serbian ordered him to throw the body overboard, according to Valle.
“Haiti big, Haiti big,” he told the Serbian in English. He tried to explain that he couldn’t drag the body by himself. Valle was so scared that his legs wouldn’t stop shaking, he recalled.
Valle testified that Tomasevic threatened him with the gun and forced him to drag the corpse to the upper deck. Valle grabbed the body by the feet, while the Serbian carried Pierre-Saint’s head.
On the upper deck, the Serbian ordered Valle to go down and bring one of the weights Tomasevic used to exercise. The cabin was locked, so the Serbian told Valle to grab one of the ship’s shackles, a 25-kilo metal link for the boat’s chains and rigging. Valle tied a rope around Pierre-Saint’s body and attached the shackle.
“I tied a line around his waist and tied the shackle, and then we placed him on the freeboard. And right then the shackle dropped and dragged the body into the sea,” Valle said. Tomasevic made him clean the blood on the deck. While he was doing it, he heard a new shot. The Serbian, who had not removed his finger from the gun’s trigger, had involuntarily fired, slightly wounding his legs with the shrapnel from the metal stairs.
Captain Ingar says that Tomasevic ordered him to set a course for the location where his accomplices were supposed to collect the drugs. To make sure he obeyed, the Serbian showed Ingar a photo of the Peruvian’s relatives.
“We know your family, we know everyone’s families,” Tomasevic said, according to Ingar. “So you must work with us.”
The crew realized that if the drug traffickers arrived to pick up the cocaine shipment, they would kill them all to leave no witnesses.
“Slow down the engines, now the priority is the crew,” DEA agent Jiménez wrote in the chat with Velásquez.
The Navigator replied: “If they [slow down the engines’ speed] another one will die, that was the kidnapper’s warning.”
“They should break the engines somehow,” Jiménez instructed.
Velásquez didn’t relay those orders to the crew.
The agent’s next message, at 9:12 p.m., Dominican Republic time, surprised him: “If you talk to them (the crew) remind them that they know nothing,” Jiménez wrote.
With that sentence, The Navigator says, the agency started to distance from the operation.
“She was asking me to tell them that they shouldn’t say this was a DEA operation,” Velásquez said.
Police vs. Narcos
Shortly after, a race began. The drug traffickers were headed to the pick-up spot while the Spanish Police hurried to intercept the tugboat.
Chanel Antoine, the Haitian oiler, had positioned himself in a vantage point in the Sea Paradise’s crane, far from Tomasevic’s sight. From there, he tracked the Serbian’s movements in the command bridge. In the middle of the night, Antoine says, he noticed a green light twinkling on the side of the stern, close to the vessel’s flag. The oiler went down to the deck and approached the light: it was a GPS that Tomasevic had hidden. The device had allowed the drug traffickers to locate and follow the tugboat’s course. The captain threw it into the sea.
The DEA reported the kidnapping to Spanish authorities 24 hours after it occurred, according to court documents. The Spanish police, who had already received a heads-up from the US embassy about the tugboat and an invitation to participate in a controlled delivery, was already prepared to seize the ship. But the kidnapping forced them to summon personnel trained for dealing with hostage situations.
On November 11, Condo a Spanish Customs patrol boat left the island of Santa Cruz de la Palma. Thirty miles north, at around 7 p.m., the police located the tugboat.
When Tomasevic saw the Condor, he asked captain Alonso, who had replaced Ingar at the helm, if he knew anything about the vessel. Alonso lied: it was a dredger, he told the Serbian. But Tomasevic didn’t believe him. He hurriedly asked his people if they knew the meaning of “Aduanas,” the word he had seen on the side of the approaching ship. They answered shortly: “Customs.”
Panicking, Tomasevic stripped in the command bridge in front of two crew and threw his clothes and satellite phone overboard.
Using another satellite phone, captain Alonso informed the Spanish police that four crew were hiding in the servomotor and that three more had been locked in their cabins. Tomasevic was in the bow, he said.
A Changing Story
The Spanish Police boarded the tugboat and arrested Tomasevic and the rest of the crew . They were all transported to Tenerife.
In written and verbal statements before the courts, the sailors insisted that the operation was overseen by the DEA and that they had been working with the agency, with the mediation of Velásquez, during the whole trip. Therefore, they shouldn’t be charged with drug trafficking, the men argued. Only one of them said that he learned that the tugboat was carrying drugs after he boarded.
The DEA immediately distanced itself from the operation. On November 14, in a document, the agency informed the Spanish justice system that they had no s of collaboration agreements with the crew , and that they were not responsible for the Sea Paradise or the cocaine onboard.
Velásquez its that the crew didn’t have any direct agreements with the DEA, but he says that he can prove that they were working with the agency since day one. Agent Jiménez witnessed their cooperation, he added.
That argument hasn’t had any effect on the Spanish criminal case. In the April indictment of one of the crew , the court wrote that the men “were part of criminal conglomerate whose objective was, in a stable and continued manner, the transport of great quantities of cocaine from South America to Spain.”
The crew told Univision that they haven’t been charged with drug trafficking in any other country in the world.
A few weeks after the judicial process began, however, there was a surprising turn. Several of the crew suddenly exonerated the DEA of all responsibility in the operation, testifying that they weren’t sure if the agency was the “competent authority” in charge.
Velásquez says that the crew changed their testimonies following his instructions. He claims the DEA ed him through another informant, who participated in the operation. They sent word that, in exchange for denying the DEA’s involvement, the agency would try to find a diplomatic solution that would lead to the release of the crew , according to The Navigator.
But Velásquez says that the agency hasn’t kept its promise, and the Sea Paradise’s men remain in prison.
“They abandoned me, and they abandoned my people. And what do they want me to do? Do they want me to stay silent and abandon my men over there?” Velásquez said. “No, I can’t. And I won’t stay quiet unless they shut me up.”
Univision Investiga producers and reporters Margarita Rabin, Mónica Romero, Verónica Guzmán, and Fernanda Valdivia contributed reporting to this story.
'THE NAVIGATOR’S' SECRET SEAS
The Colombian Jorge Velásquez, who has been infiltrating organized crime for more than 30 years, says he will leave his role. He is disappointed by how the DEA handled the Sea Paradise operation, he says.
By GERARDO REYES
In the late 1980s, two major Colombian criminal organizations, the Cali and the Medellín cartels, were at war. of each faction killed each other every other day. At the same time, the Medellín cartel, led by Pablo Escobar, launched a brutal offensive against the Colombian government to try to stop the extradition of its associates to the United States.
Jorge Velásquez, a sailor from the Colombian Pacific region, sided with Cali and the government. He offered to infiltrate the organization of José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, another Medellín cartel kingpin, known by the alias “The Mexican.”
His way into the organization was associated to what he did best: navigating the high seas.
In 2009, Velásquez told me that he infiltrated Rodríguez Gacha’s inner circle after he successfully delivered a ship full of guns from Antigua to Colombia. The weapons ended up in the hands of The Mexican’s paramilitary group.
“Everything I did, I reported to Cali and to three police officers,” Velásquez said.
Eventually, Rodríguez Gacha placed his safety in Velásquez’s hands. The Navigator ed the information along to his bosses in Cali and to the Colombian police. After ten months inside Gacha’s organization, Velásquez coordinated a police operation that ended with the drug trafficker’s death in a semirural area in the country’s Atlantic coast.
The Navigator was riding the police helicopter that chased Rodríguez Gacha. In an interview I published in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, Velásquez called into question the official version of the kingpin’s death, which stated that The Mexican was killed from the helicopter by a policeman. Velásquez says that Rodríguez Gacha activated an explosive device next to his head after making a defiant sign with his hand.
“In that moment, Gacha flashed me an angry look, raised his hand, gave me the finger, and put something in front of his face that exploded. It was a small device, smaller than a grenade. And that’s how he died,” Velásquez said.
With a juicy reward from the Cali kingpins, The Navigator left Colombia and kept on infiltrating the “bad guys,” (los malos) as he calls drug traffickers, working with different federal agencies in the United States and with Colombian authorities.
Three different sources with knowledge of the world of federal collaborators confirmed to Univision that Velásquez has been an informant of government agencies since the 1990s.
In an interview for the book Nuestro Hombre en la DEA ( Our Man in the DEA), convicted drug trafficker Carlos Ramón Zapata, alias ‘The Medic,’ said that he was captured in an undercover operation staged by The Navigator to supposedly move drugs from Venezuela. All meetings between Ramón and Velásquez were recorded by agents of the DEA’s Group 9, according to Ramón.
Velásquez learned his navigational skills in his birthplace, Buenaventura, a port in the Colombian Pacific coast. He says that he started infiltrating cartels because he was an adrenaline junkie and because he “wanted to do something positive” for society. He used the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Colombia as his command centers.
For him, being an informant is not a full-time job. While he coordinates the departure of “decoy” ships to catch drug dealers, the 70-year-old sailor also manages crews of builders who work in renovation and the construction of high rises in Brickell, an exclusive neighborhood in Miami’s financial district.
The screenshots Velásquez shared with Univision show the unusual double life of a confidential informant: next to photos of real estate renovations, Home Depot receipts, and his men working on the structures of Miami’s luxurious buildings, there are also images of the Sea Paradise’s expenses, the crew ’ payrolls, and the routes he drew by hand in his navigational charts.